Almost invariably, the operation of digital electronic circuitry requires the availability or generation of a pulse or delay having a reliable and consistent duration. Individual devices, especially those fabricated upon high-density integrated circuits cannot usually be relied upon to provide accurate or consistent time delays or clock functions. This is because, barring the use of prohibitively expensive methods (such as trimming), fabrication process tolerances cannot be tightly controlled for the batch-production environments in which such circuits are typically manufactured. For example, in the mass-production of semiconductor integrated circuits it is not uncommon for absolute individual device characteristics, such as the particular channel resistance within a field-effect transistor ("FET") or a given device capacitance level, to vary by as much as 100 percent from wafer to wafer. It is this wide variation in device characteristics that renders individual passive or active devices upon an integrated circuit impractical and unreliable for purposes of providing predictable timing intervals--especially in high-speed computing applications where accurate timing and precise circuit delay times are critical.